Eric's Tech Blog

With Microsoft's declaration of intent to remove support of basic authentication for cloud Business Central instances, it's time to start figuring out the not-so-new kid on the block: OAuth.  OAuth (Open Authentication) has been around for some time now and it provides many advantages over legacy methods.  One of the biggest ones has been Single Sign On.  Rather than having to create a multitude of accounts for an ever growing list of websites, you can use you Gmail account or Facebook login.  The client site then gets a token that is unrelated to your actual credentials and you have one less password to worry about.  Of course, this all comes at a cost and it can be pretty painful if you have any applications that need to be migrated and you are on the bleeding edge where documentation is sparse and a bit confusing.  After trudging through the muddy waters of Business Central OAuth documentation, I'm pleased to say I've come out the other side and I can n...

1/13/20 - This apparently only applies to NAV.  See note at the end for connecting to Business Central It took me a little while to nail down authenticating to a Dynamics NAV OData web service with Postman.  Fiddler does it quite easily but I suspect it is a little more intelligent while Postman requires the correct settings for everything. First, in NAV you need to have NTLM authentication enabled.  I have found this is required any time you want to use the web services with anything other than .NET (and even then...). Now, with NTLM enabled, you might think the authentication is NTLM but you'd be wrong.  It's Digest.  There are two flavors of Digest: MD5 and MD5-sess.  By default, Postman will come up with MD5.  I discovered it was supposed to be MD5-sess by using Chrome's developer console.  With this console open, make the GET request and you can see all of the data being exchanged. Within the Authorization header, toward the end, you wi...